Food Allergy Awareness Week… Plus Muffins! (Top 8 allergen free)

This week is Food Allegy Awareness week. It’s feeling rather poignant at the moment, as this week I sent off my little girl to childcare, for the first time since she was accidentally given dairy there a couple of weeks ago. So I wrote this, feeling slightly sick, with an undercurrent of anxiety at the thought of her being there again.

We were “lucky” this time. She didn’t have an anaphylactic reaction. She had one sip of milk, immediately coughed, then started vomiting. She threw up several times for the next few hours, and then spent the next week with abdominal cramps and an upset stomach. All from one tiny sip. It is scary to think of what may have happened had she ingested a bit more.

My little girl was understandably scared about returning, and it’s taken a lot of reassurance to convince her that it will be safe there. Of course, we’ve had multiple conversations with the childcare director, about how to ensure this won’t happen again. We needed a new risk management plan, ensuring that someone sits with her during meals, and that she cannot access the dairy milk the other children are drinking. Lots of conversations at home, about always checking, before she eats or drinks anything. It’s a lot of responsibility for a four year old.

To help her feel safe when she returned today, she asked for a special lunch box from home. As her centre is egg free, she couldn’t take any of her usual bread, so I baked these muffins as an alternative. They are free of the top 8 major allergens – peanuts, treenuts, dairy, shellfish, fish, soy, wheat and egg.